by No one knows exactly how many coats, jeans, T-shirts and trainers are produced each year, which means no one knows how many garments are still unsold in warehouses, destined for filling ground or destroyed. Without this information, trying to reduce the carbon footprint of the fashion industry is a bit like solving a puzzle in the dark.
The available statistics indicate that between 80bn and 150bn garments are made each year and that between 10% and 40% of these are not sold. So it could be 8bn or 60bn extra garments per year – a staggering difference.
“Production volumes are a really important opportunity to bring honesty back into the conversation,” says Liz Ricketts, co-founder and executive director of the Or Foundation, an environmental justice charity based in Ghana. “It’s a data point that everyone has access to. It’s just a matter of companies being willing to share it.”
Believing that transparency around production volumes is central to assessing and combating the scope of environmental problems in fashion, the Or Foundation launched the Speak Volumes campaign in November, which invites brands to reveal how many units they did in 2022.
To date, 32 small and medium-sized enterprises have participated. The biggest exposure came from the British brand Lucy & Yak, which produced 760,951 pieces; the smallest came from Scottish brand Mlambo, at just 100 items. It’s a far cry from the billions of garments thought to have been made by fashion’s biggest players, none of whom participated in it.
“The reason they don’t like to talk about the size of their product is because it’s the dirty secret of the industry,” says Francois Souchet, circular economy and sustainability strategist. “There’s probably going to be a huge public backlash when people realize how much product doesn’t sell.”
At the Kantamanto market in Accra, Ghana, where the Or Foundation works to support the community that trades in unwanted clothing from the global north, around 40% of every bale of textiles ends up as waste. As a result of this figure Ricketts asked brands to commit to a 40% reduction in new clothing production over five years, which can only be achieved with visibility of production volumes. “It feels like bad business,” says Ricketts. “Why did you make so many extras?”
There are several reasons why brands produce more than they sell: manufacturers requiring minimum order quantities; an increasingly rapid retail cycle fueled by frequent delivery of new products; failure to read the market. While there are a number of new technologies to tackle these problems, including AI to predict consumer demand and made-to-order models, none of them show signs of widespread adoption.
Brands have a demand for manufacturing in the same way they manufacture too many clothes
Liz Ricketts, the Gold Foundation
Overproduction is also a sign of an ancient manufacturing system that encourages volume: the more T-shirts ordered, the cheaper the price of each garment. This is because the biggest costs of producing fabric and assembling garments are in the setup; the longer the assembly line runs, the more efficient it is. “Also, brands are afraid of losing a sale, so they always over-order, rather than under-ordering,” says Souchet.
The excessive waste in the industry is a result of the way disposable clothes are taken into account in rich countries. It is also a symbol of how well supply chains are hidden from and misunderstood by consumers.
“There’s a lot of human labor that goes into our clothes, from cotton picking, spinning and weaving to the garment workers and how often they don’t see their children because of the hours they work,” says Christina Dean, the founder of the organization. the anti-waste charity Szasamh. “For those pieces to be trashed in such a careless way is just how misaligned we are with our fellow humans in this world.”
A recent survey by the Global Fashion Agenda (GFA) found that 78% of brands have targets to reduce overproduction. But according to Holly Syrett, the GFA’s program director of impact and sustainability, respondents cited a lack of clarity about what overproduction means as a barrier to tackling it.
“We define overproduction quite simply,” she says. “When a company buys or produces more stock than it can sell, leaving stock that is then sold at a discount, resold to other parties or potentially destroyed. The feedback we received was that our definition is not specific enough.”
But overstocking isn’t the only problem, says Ricketts: “We try to use the language of ‘oversupply’ more than ‘overproduction’, because we’re talking about the marketing mechanisms used to over- push supply forward to consumers. There is a demand to manufacture brands in the same way that they manufacture too many clothes.” This demand is created through relentless marketing across social media, targeted digital ads, email campaigns and a seemingly never-ending cycle of discounts and promotions.
Of course, the other side of this coin is overconsumption. It’s hard to say without knowing how many products go unsold, but that’s clearly garments is purchases account for most of the industry’s carbon footprint. “If we say, conservatively, 60% to 70% of garments are sold, that’s where most of the emissions are,” says Souchet.
This is the hard truth almost always avoided at industry summits and corporate goals. According to the sustainability think tank Hot or Cool Institute, the fashion industry will need to cut its greenhouse gas emissions from 2018 levels by at least half by 2030 if it is to meet the Paris agreement’s target of limiting global temperature rises to Achieving 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. levels. While other business models such as rental, resale and repair are mentioned, Hot or Cool says meeting 1.5C in the G20 high-income countries – including the UK, US, France and Australia – will require consumption of 60% reduction.
On its current trajectory, industry emissions will double in the next 10 years. In order to reduce production and consumption rates, it is clear that pending European legislation regarding extended producer responsibility schemes cannot come soon enough.
“Rapid and radical changes in production and legislation are critical,” says Lewis Akenji, managing director of Hot or Cool. “Expanding producer responsibility [EPR] it’s a promising path for fashion brands into the after-use phase … but it shouldn’t be a burden-shifting mechanism.”
Counterfeit EPR schemes propose a financial levy of as little as €0.06 per item, to be paid by the producer, and responsibility for contributing to end-of-life management of a product through initiatives such as textile-to-textile recycling, upcycling, downcycling, rental, resale and repair.
Ricketts and Souchet believe that any levy would need to be much higher to achieve a meaningful reduction. Since the overproduction makes sense from an economic point of view, Souchet says, the amount would have to be “significant” to change the industry. Ricketts says it is vital that the EPR legislation ensures that the money raised reaches communities like those in Ghana who are bearing the burden of textile waste.
“How do we think we’re going to move into circularity by continuing to pump this non-stop oversupply of product? No way,” she says. “The policies must take into account production volumes. It doesn’t matter how much innovation or money brands pump into solutions [such as textile recycling]we will not succeed unless we slow down.”
